Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir

7:00 PM

Join Reverend Billy’s Earthalujah! show on Saturday April 2 in LPAC . This is a show unlike any you’ve seen before, a hybrid sermon/song/carnivalesque extravaganza that you won’t soon forget. The show is family friendly but big bank deadly, especially the ones that finance CO-2 emissions through mountaintop removal, hydro-fracking, super malls and shipping sweatshop products long distances with fossil fuel-burning engines. In the Church of Earthalujah we escape the old fundamentalist god but find life itself funny, scary, and it makes the 35 voice Stop Shopping Gospel Choir want to sing and shout!

Reverend Billy is an internationally known anti-corporate and environmental activist. While he mimics the hyperventilating, white-suit, Elvis-hairdo televangelist persona, he preaches a message altogether different from your typical Reverend. Billy and his gospel choir perform street and traditional theater to communicate a positive message of community empowerment, environmental sustainability and social change. Reverend Billy crosses typical genre barriers and blurs the barriers between life, performance and activism in a way that has not been experienced on campus. The Church also stages spirited theatrical interventions to support creative campaigns for social justice, and has recently been pressuring banks to divest from Mountaintop Removal coal mining in Appalachia.

Presented by Mountain Justice with the generous support of the SBC Fun Fund, FFS, Drama Board, Cooper Serendipity Fund, Environmental Studies, Sociology/Anthropology, Peace and Conflict Studies, Music, Political Science and the Lang Center.

This morning, after President Obama’s address to the nation last night, Swarthmore’s Prof. Dominic Tierney appeared on WHYY’s program Radio Times, to talk about the Obama doctrine and Libya. You can listen to the interview with the player at the bottom of this post.

From Radio Times:

The morning after President Obama’s prime-time speech about his decision to intervene militarily in Libya, we take stock of the emerging ‘Obama doctrine’ guiding U.S. foreign policy. Citing a controversial and new United Nations principle known as the “Responsibility to Protect,” advocates for military intervention on humanitarian grounds succeeded in reversing the Obama administration’s initial reluctance to get involved in a third military front in the Muslim world. Helping us make sense of the President’s speech, his foreign policy and its implications for the Middle East are Swarthmore political scientist DOMINIC TIERNEY, TOM MALINOWSKI of Human Rights Watch and AARON DAVID MILLER of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College is organizing a three-film series this semester based around the theme of Nonviolent Movements for Rights and Liberation. Our second film will be The Singing Revolution.

Music sustained the Estonian people during decades of Soviet and Nazi occupation and was a crucial part of their struggle for freedom  The Singing Revolution is the first film to tell this historical tale.

When: March 30, 2011 at 7:30 p.m.

Where: Science Center Room 199 at Swarthmore College

This event is open to the public.

Refreshments provided.

Discussion to follow the screening.

Maps and driving instructions are available

Download a color flyer or a black/white flyer.

Contact: Lee Smithey (LSmithe1) or Anna Everetts (AEveret1) 610-328-7750

Co-sponsored by Peace and Conflict Studies, History, Music, Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology, Dance

Coming soon … April 13: Iron Jawed Angels

At each event in the series, students from the course, “Peace Studies and Action,” will offer two brief tributes to influential peace activists and intellectuals who have passed away recently.

Swarthmore’s News and Information office recently posted a story on the emergence of mass nonviolent resistance in the Middle East.

Lee Smithey, associate professor of sociology and coordinator of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program, recently published an article in The Atlantic regarding the revolutionary nonviolent resistance movement that toppled the long-established authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. The article addresses “a shared set of ideas about nonviolent resistance” from “a new generation of scholars and advocates” such as Gene Sharp, whose inspirational role in the Arab peace movement was featured in a widely-read article in the New York Times.

According to Smithey, successful nonviolent resistance can be attributed to the large-scale impact of regular citizens who withdraw from their daily activities and responsibilities, thus applying a range of economic, political, and social pressures to coerce a regime into complying.   Read the whole story.

Please join us for a lecture by Kristen E. Gwinn, Ph.D. about her book, Emily Greene Balch: The Long Road to Internationalism.

Thursday, March 31, 2011 at 4:30 p.m.

McCabe Library Popular Reading Room

Swarthmore College

Maps and driving instructions are available

Download flyers (keystroke Ctrl+S in Google Docs)

Visit the display of Balch’s books, letters, and artifacts just inside the front door of McCabe Library.

Emily Greene Balch was the second U.S. woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded in 1946.  Balch was a humanitarian, internationalist, and  professor of economics and sociology at Wellesley College.  She helped found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom during World War I and served as president of the U.S. section of that organization in the 1930s.  With the rise of militarism in Europe and Asia in the 1930s, Balch wrestled with her beliefs in peace, and she focused on the fate of refugees and displaced persons from Europe and combined her ideas on internationalism, global citizenship, and cultural diversity.  Kristen Gwinn (visiting scholar at Northwestern University) has written the first scholarly biography of this fascinating woman.  Her talk will contextualize Balch’s leadership, intellectual role, and philosophy in the development of American attitudes toward war and women in the twentieth century.

Kristen E. Gwinn is a visiting scholar with the history department at Northwestern University. She holds a PhD in History from George Washington University and a Master’s Degree in International Peace Studies from Trinity College Dublin. She is the author of Emily Greene Balch: The Long Road to Internationalism, and served as a graduate editorial fellow for The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers: The Human Rights Years, 1945–1948. She believes that utilizing technology to educate one another about history is of vital importance. She builds technological components, such as web sites and databases, to further this mission through her consulting agency HistoryIT (www.historyit.com). She also contributes to and manages several historical web sites, including www.ja1325.org and www.herhatwasinthering.org.

Sponsored by the Peace Collection, the Peace and Conflict Studies Program, and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and SwatFems.

Contact: Wendy Chmielewski (wchmiel1) or Lee Smithey (lsmithe1)

Jasper Goldberg ’12 has been commenting on his study abroad experience and his minor in peace and conflict studies on the college’s website.

Swarthmore has given me a solid background in peace and conflict studies, but I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of my minor and see the actual places that I read so much about. My semester away challenged many of the notions I had of the world and helped me to understand how incredibly nuanced this world is.  read more …

Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College is organizing a three-film series this semester based around the theme of Nonviolent Movements for Rights and Liberation. Our first film will be Budrus.

When: March 16, 2011 at 7:30 p.m.

Where: The Keith Room of the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility at Swarthmore College

This event is open to the public.

Popcorn and refreshments provided; Discussion to follow the screening

Maps and driving instructions are available

Download a color flyer or a black/white flyer

Budrus follows a Palestinian leader who unites Fatah, Hamas and Israelis in an unarmed movement to save his village from destruction. Success eludes them until his 15-year-old daughter jumps into the fray.

Contact: Lee Smithey (LSmithe1) or Anna Everetts (AEveret1) 610-328-7750

Co-sponsored by Peace and Conflict Studies, Swarthmore College Library, Students for Peace and Justice in Palestine, Islamic Studies, History, Sociology and Anthropology, Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility

Coming soon…

March 30: The Singing Revolution

April 13: Iron Jawed Angels

At each event in the series, students from the course, “Peace Studies and Action,” will offer two brief tributes to influential peace activists and intellectuals who have passed away recently.

In the midst of uprisings spreading across the Middle East, an article titled “The Power of Nonviolent Resistance” by Prof. Lee Smithey appeared in The Atlantic last week. Prof. Dominic Tierney also authors a regular blog on The Atlantic website.

I am happy to share that our own Anna Everetts (Administrative Assistant for the Programs Office) is a recipient of this year’s Judy Lord Award.

The Judy Lord Endowment was established in 2004 by anonymous donors who are friends of the College. The endowment memorializes Judy Lord’s enthusiasm and community spirit and is a reward for hard work and contributions to Swarthmore College life. Earnings from the Judy Lord endowment are awarded to academic departmental administrative assistants with tenure of 10 or more years at the College.

I’m sure you will all want to join me in congratulating Anna for this recognition of her hard work!